We now reviewed all the conclusions we had reached. Then I was glad to have them speak once more of good and bad, and ask many questions. Ruth said she was not sure of being convinced. She said: “I talked it over with mother. It seems to me I sometimes put my thought into your words, and imagine you have said what I mean, when perhaps you haven’t. Please repeat that again, about good and bad.” Ruth is always afraid she may be weakening in her own ideas, and tries not to be convinced. I strove to impress upon her that my idea might include hers. I said: “You see now that the thought I want to give you is an unanswerable religion, which is not new, but larger than all the old beliefs.” Marian asked: “Large enough to include them all?” “Yes, just that. Did you ever think of the old word, holiness, h-o-l-i-n-e-s-s? I know another word that to us would mean holiness, a different holiness.” “You mean w-h-o-l-e?” said Marian. “Yes, to be whole and complete.” Now as we spoke again of good and bad, we came upon the interesting question of disease. “How can that be explained as a part of progress?” asked Marian. Virginia, with her usual misconception on this subject, said that disease helped us forward because through it scientists came to know and understand many things about life. Henry, still more off the track, said that disease led to a knowledge of medicine. “Henry’s idea,” I answered, “we cannot consider, because, of course, the only virtue of medical skill is that it cures disease, and if there were not disease we would not need medical progress. But Virginia’s idea is true in a certain sense. It is quite true that disease impelled people to use the microscope, to discover themselves physically, to learn of the infinitude of minute creatures in the universe; and so it led to a larger knowledge of life, because the infinitely little makes our world just as vast as the infinitely big. But this only shows that we made progress out of disease, as we make progress out of all things, because the will of life, the will to go forward, is within us. It does not show how disease itself can be the result or price of progress. That is a difficult question, but I seem to see it clearly, and I will try to explain it to you. None of you, except perhaps Virginia and Alfred, have a clear idea of evolution, and I would like to spend one meeting in explaining it, because it is so essential. Don’t you think so?” “Yes,” they said.